Welcome to Hai Long Dao's webpage

My research interests are focused on commutative algebra and its connections to neighbor fields such as algebraic K-theory or algebraic geometry. One of the motivations for my research is a group of questions informally known as "the homological conjectures". Surprisingly, there is an
wiki entry for them, in case you are curious. For a very readable history of these questions, see this book review by Craig Huneke.

The main reason I started working on these questions was my thesis advisor,
Mel Hochster. He has been obsessed with these problems for over 30 years and some of his best work were motivated
by them. Needless to say, the remaining questions are pretty hard, but it does not prevent him from trying
them on his students! Three years into the program, I seriously considered switching to Economics, since compared
to Serre's Positivity Conjecture, the global poverty problem seemed at least doable! Fortunately,
Mel's constant encouragement and kindness (plus his enormous grant) helped me through, and now I enjoy thinking about them a whole lot more. In fact, these are beautiful problems, and it is quite easy to fall in love with them. Trouble is, your love
is almost never returned (just like high school!). As often with doomed love affairs, this one did bring out some
unintended consequenses, a summary of which you can find here .

Sometimes I put questions related to my research on Mathoverflow. It has been great fun!

Commutative Algebra at KU

There is a very active Commutative Algebra/Algebraic Geometry group at KU. The
group page has a lot more information
on the people and the upcoming seminars .

Teaching

This semester, I am teaching:
Math 791.
The 32nd KU Mathematics Prize Competition will take place on Monday,
April 7, 2014, from 6-9 PM in Snow 306. Please register online
if you are interested.
More general information can be found here .

Personal

I was born and raised in Hanoi, Vietnam. I came to
the University of Sydney in 1997 and got my Bachelor of Science there
in 2000. I came to the US in Jan 2001, and spent a semester at the University
of Maine. Finally, I settled down at the Mathematics Department at University of Michigan (Ann Arbor)
for my PhD and finished in April 2006. Between August 2006 and June 2008 I was a pretty happy
post-doc at the University of Utah. In 2008 I accepted a tenure-track position at University of Kansas. Below is a picture of me
in front of the Daily Show headquater in NY. (I started watching it in 2001, before most people in my house, which holds 30 American undergrads, noticed me laughing histerically every night around 11pm ! So I think I did contribute to its popularity. You're welcome, Jon! ) A more serious account
of my (academic) history is my CV .